


love is not like anything

by quietcoast



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Parrish Loves Ronan Lynch, College Student Adam Parrish, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Not Canon Compliant - Call Down the Hawk, Post-Opal (a Raven Cycle Story), Ronan Lynch Loves Adam Parrish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:28:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25357003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietcoast/pseuds/quietcoast
Summary: Ronan was the natural product of a month like November. It was the sudden shift of something comfortable into something dangerous; it tapped Ronan on the shoulder like it would punch him when he turned around to look. In his interactions with others, Ronan tended to take a similar tactic.For the nineteenth time, Ronan’s birthday waited at the beginning of November like a razor blade in an apple.The first cut it made was this: 8:15 am mass at St. Agnes Church.Under the singing, the talking and praying and confessing and chatting, the church was a quiet place. It was not heated well; it was striped with candle smoke; the walls seemed to absorb sound and hold on to it indefinitely, like a hand clasped over a thousand mouths that hadn’t quite stopped speaking. So much of Ronan belonged to this place.Church, and November. The exact lines between life and what came after.After mass, Ronan ducked out the door and into his car and did not,did notlook to the tiny, slanting attic apartment where Adam Parrish had lived.
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 27
Kudos: 226





	love is not like anything

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote most of this story right before Call Down the Hawk came out....and then I read the book.....and discovered that there was a VERY similar chapter in CDTH, so I decided not to post this. But now it's been long enough since it came out that I'm like, eh, whatever. So here you go!

November snuck up on Ronan every year.

_When you were born_ , his father had said, and said, and said, _when you were born, the rivers dried up and the cattle in Rockingham County wept blood._

 _When you were born,_ his mother had corrected each time, reliable like a shadow following a man, _the trees bloomed like springtime and all the ravens laughed._

Because Ronan Lynch had only been born once, he had never seen a November built from flowers or blood. November as he knew it was flat and cold, a thing made of greys and browns: branches blown bare, air sharp with wood smoke and the question of snow, tire ruts frozen into muddy peaks.

Ronan was the natural product of a month like November. It was the sudden shift of something comfortable into something dangerous; it tapped Ronan on the shoulder like it would punch him when he turned around to look. In his interactions with others, Ronan tended to take a similar tactic.

For the nineteenth time, Ronan’s birthday waited at the beginning of November like a razor blade in an apple.

The first cut it made was this: 8:15 am mass at St. Agnes Church.

It was All Saints Day, a day of remembrance for those who had attained heaven. A day for Ronan to think about martyrs and sacrifices, about the precise cocktail of prayers and actions that might save him from damnation, about whether his dead parents made it to heaven or purgatory or whether they had souls at all.

Every year, Ronan’s birthday began with mass. He was a product of November. He was a product of a day that seemed uniquely made for him, a day that from his first bloody, blooming moments knew how much he would lose.

It was a holy day, and the pews were full. Declan and Matthew, unable to beg off their respective work and school duties for more than the morning, were attending in DC; Ronan tried his very best to make himself blank, to sing steadily and listen quietly, to face this day alone and pray that the priest did not come to him with any words about Aurora and Niall Lynch.

(During Ronan’s childhood, the Lynches had taken up an entire pew all by themselves. Ronan, having scrubbed himself clean the night before, would rise on November first feeling irritated that he had to give so much of his day to the church, but also feeling smug that this holy day was his, too. After mass, the old ladies in the congregation would come up and tell him how big he was getting.)

Under the singing, the talking and praying and confessing and chatting, the church was a quiet place. It was not heated well; it was striped with candle smoke; the walls seemed to absorb sound and hold on to it indefinitely, like a hand clasped over a thousand mouths that hadn’t quite stopped speaking. So much of Ronan belonged to this place.

Church, and November. The exact lines between life and what came after.

After mass, Ronan ducked out the door and into his car and did not, _did not_ look to the tiny, slanting attic apartment where Adam Parrish had lived, the place where he had been closest to Ronan and farthest from him.

Ronan checked his phone. He did not want to check his phone, but he knew that on this, his birthday, it was expected of him. And—well. Maybe there were people he wanted to hear from. When the sleek, barely used face of his cell phone came alive under his thumb, he had _Happy birthday, bro_ from Declan, and _happy birthday bro!!!!_ from Matthew. Ronan replied with a thumbs up and a balloon, respectively. Not bad.

On the drive home, his phone shivered to life again with a call from Gansey that Ronan almost talked himself into ignoring. But he didn’t ignore it, and as a reward for picking up, Ronan received the full force of Blue’s decent singing voice and Gansey’s awful one, as well as a brief but uncomfortably sincere conversation about how much they missed him. By the time they reached that portion of the conversation, Ronan was glad to be parked in the driveway of the Barns, with his feet firmly set on gravel and solid earth.

Ronan unlocked the house with the same uneasy feeling he always had—that is, the feeling that the sort of people who might want to get inside his home would not be deterred by locks. Opal was inside, curled into a neat, furry pile on the couch. Ronan took his shoes off by the door, padded upstairs in his sock feet to change out of his church clothes and into his work clothes, and came back down to scoop the Opal-pile gently into his arms.

She didn’t necessarily understand about birthdays, but she understood about being sad, so she burrowed into his shoulder in a way that made his insides ache for one second, two seconds, three—before wriggling down, shaking the sleep from her limbs, and heading for the door.

Outside, Ronan and Opal dug holes together, and then, once Opal got bored, Ronan dug holes alone. Near the porch, along the end of the driveway, eight inches down, four inches apart. Into each he dropped a tulip bulb that would flower electric blue or tangerine or soft, tawny brown in the impossibly distant springtime. Into each he piled dirt: fifty tiny burials.

(The Lynches had always dealt in legend, but they weren’t always the easiest stories to tell. _When you died_ , Ronan couldn’t say to his mother, _the trees all died with you. When you died,_ he couldn’t say to his father, _so did mom and everything else._ )

For lunch, Ronan trudged inside to eat a handful of M&M’s and, accidentally, a little bit of the dirt that was still under his fingernails. It was as close to festive as he felt like getting. It was Ronan, sidestepping another story about the Lynches.

(Once upon a time, there had been cakes, handmade by Aurora Lynch, every year the same: strawberry and banana for Matthew, vanilla funfetti pound cake for Declan, German chocolate for Ronan. For his father’s birthday, there would always be lemon cake; for his mother’s, Aurora always made herself a pie.)

It was getting harder to live in the house, was the thing. For all that Opal was small, she wasn’t exactly a child, and she liked to run her own little errands, so Ronan spent a lot of his time alone. His company was himself and a lifetime of his own bare feet on this cold floor, a Russian nesting doll of selves stretching as far back as he could remember and as far forward as he could imagine.

The house was overflowing with the lives of people who did not live there anymore, Ronan included. His old room didn’t feel like his anymore, like maybe twelve-year-old Ronan was still using it, so he had taken to sleeping on the couch. Everything in the kitchen had been his mother’s first, and only felt like his if he was cooking for other people, which he never did. Toddler Matthew ran his expensive train set in a continuous loop around the coffee table; preteen Declan nudged Ronan’s shoulder conspiratorially at the dining table before balancing his fork at an impossible, precarious angle on the edge of his water glass—Declan at that age was forever doing those kinds of magic tricks, little acts of rebellion against all of the real magic in the house.

Niall Lynch was perpetually pulling into the driveway. Niall Lynch was perpetually leaving.

Ronan had hated the kitchen curtains all of his life, but he could never, ever replace them without his mother’s permission.

In the afternoon, Ronan crept in with the sleeping cattle for a dream. They were medicinal, the dreams, like taking a daily pill to manage an incurable condition: he did not like the taste, but swallowed them down anyway.

Here, surrounded by warm, breathing bodies and the smell of hay, Ronan could sometimes sleep. His nineteenth birthday gift to himself was a hazy dream where a thin, wry mouth slid across his own, and a rough hand rasped across the back of his head, and a long nose pressed into his cheek. It was a good gift, until he realized that his teeth were marbles; they came loose, one by one, and filled his mouth until he struggled awake to spit a single marble into the dirt.

Having successfully produced a dream object, Ronan ambled out of the barn to check on the general state of things. Chainsaw had descended a few moments before to peck at the ground, in case something there was Good for Birds; Opal could be seen in the distance, humming raucously to herself and unburying some of Ronan’s tulips.

Dusk arrived early in November, so Ronan chopped some wood for that night’s fire like a real-life fucking lumberjack, and set out a salt lick for his deer, and hauled wood up to the house. He stacked it neatly beside the door until it became truly dark, at which point he banged inside, started twisting newspaper to use as tinder, built up his grid of kindling and logs, and, finally, was faced with the thought he had been avoiding all day: it was his birthday, and he had not heard from Adam once.

Ronan settled on the couch. His limbs were tired, but his mind was not. Was it ever? Opal, who sometimes liked to sleep in Declan’s old room, gathered an armful of apples and week-old rolls and clipped up the stairs to bed.

It wasn’t like Ronan expected his birthday to be good. But when every day was more or less insignificant, they all started piling together until it seemed unjust to have this, the one day that should be his, fall on the shitty side of normal.

And then his phone rang.

This would be him, surely this would be him; Ronan fumbled his phone from between the couch cushions where it had wedged itself, and turned the screen to face him, and—

“Fuck,” he muttered, and then answered the phone.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Calla snarled from the other end. “And don’t go to bed yet. Also, I’m charging you for this phone call.”

“And also, happy birthday!” Maura added in the background, a tinny, far away version of herself.

“And also happy birthday,” Calla amended, reluctantly.

“Hah,” said Ronan. “I await your bill,” he added, and then he hung up before Calla could hang up on him.

For the second time that day, Ronan found himself missing Blue; had she been in his living room, the psychics would have called her instead of him. Had she been at Fox Way, it would have been her voice on the phone instead of Calla’s.

Ronan blew out a breath, scrubbed at the exhaustion in his eyes, and hauled his body off of the couch. He thought he was probably hungry. Sometimes he forgot about things like eating, and sometimes it was all he could do to shove enough food in his mouth to make the gaping pit in his stomach stop screaming. His body didn’t seem to have an in-between setting. He wasn’t really sure what that was about.

Gansey had always made him eat, at Monmouth. Even if the mealtimes were impractical, even if the food came from a yellow wrapper or their bathroom refrigerator. It was just another example of their outstanding and improbable symbiosis: Gansey, red-eyed and tousled, would stick his head into Ronan’s room and say, “Have you eaten?” and Ronan would say, “No. You?” and then they would venture out to the all night grocery store or the drive-thru window, or scavenge from the fridge and eat sitting on the bathroom floor, which was an act that even Chainsaw had found distasteful. Sometimes Noah would come with, or perch distrustfully against the bathroom sink, though he never ate anything.

In retrospect, Ronan could not believe that it had taken them so long to notice that Noah was dead.

(Dinner at the Barns was usually a meat-and-potatoes affair, where the amount of vegetables present increased in direct proportion to how long Niall Lynch had been away. The night before he came home would often feature salad and green beans, roasted mounds of the asparagus that grew wild in the ditches, the summer zucchini surplus prepared three different ways. “Your father will want to know that I’ve been taking care of you boys,” Aurora would say, not fretfully, but not without concern, either.

Meals upon Niall Lynch’s return tended more toward the realm of medium-rare steaks, of beef stews and shepherd’s pies and breakfast-for-dinners, and clandestine, twinkling sips taken from their father’s bitter glass of dark beer.)

All Saints Day. Jesus. Ronan had so many people to miss, both dead and living, that he was surprised the weight of them all wasn’t sinking him through the floor. Missing everyone was a full-time job; Ronan suspected that it was why he never got anything done.

Calla had ordered him to stop feeling sorry for himself. He wasn’t doing a very good job of following her instructions. If Adam had been there to hear Ronan’s thoughts, he would have called him impractical—or, no, the Adam that Ronan had first known, back in those dark months when they were all a mess, would have called him impractical, and worse. The Adam of right now would have called him _Lynch_ , would have said itin the kind of voice that a different, lesser significant other might have applied to the word _baby_ or _honey_.

He wanted to call Adam. He was not going to call Adam.

Ronan was three-quarters of the way to considering what it might taste like to sandwich some apple slices between two halves of a roll, when he realized that there was no fucking way he was about to actually cut up an apple, not when it was his _birthday_ , not when God had given him thirty-two perfectly good apple demolition tools right there in his mouth. So he shoved down half of a roll, and followed it with a chunk of apple as he shuffled back to the nest he had made in the living room.

He thought about this time on his birthday a year ago, when he and Adam had kissed for the first time, when Gansey had been so near to his death. It was a complicated memory, so he moved on to thinking about his birthday the year before that, when he had achieved a profound level of desperate drunkenness, and its gift of sixteen hours of black, dreamless sleep had left him still intoxicated upon waking. Ronan was busy recalling the experience with a wistful sense of longing when someone knocked on the door.

 _No_ , Ronan thought. He hurled himself to his feet, nearly tripped on a rug, and fumbled at the front door until it was unlocked, until it was open.

_Yes._

“I meant to be here so much earlier,” Adam said. His cheeks were pink with cold, and his eyes were wide and bright with tiredness. He had car keys in one hand, and the strap of his backpack in the other. “Would you believe that my car tried to break down an hour outside of DC?”

“Your car would never,” Ronan said, and then, “you’re here.”

“Yes,” Adam replied. His mouth had a wry cast to it, a little impatient, a little amused. “Of course I’m here. It’s your birthday.”

Ronan gently removed Adam’s backpack from his hand, and set it on the floor inside the house. And then he put his arms around Adam, and folded him in until the world ran out of room for anything other than the clean, neutral scent of Adam’s hair, the solid warmth where their chests pressed together, the damp catch of Adam’s mouth against the top of Ronan’s trapezius muscle.

“Parrish,” Ronan mumbled. The tone of his voice said _lover_ and _sweetheart_ and _thank you_.

Adam pulled back just enough to kiss him, slow and careful, the best thing, so much better than the dream Ronan had given himself earlier. The keys Adam still held were a sharp spot of cold through the fabric of Ronan’s tank top. Ronan wanted to drown in him. Ronan wanted to eat him alive.

“Can I come inside, or?” Adam half-asked, once Ronan had graduated to nosing the noncommittal wave of hair above Adam’s hearing ear, rasping his stubble against Adam’s cheek.

“Vampire,” Ronan accused vaguely, delightedly. “Like you need me to invite you in.”

“Mhmm,” Adam answered into Ronan’s neck. “But actually.”

They went inside. Chainsaw made a sleepy noise of recognition from her perch atop a bookshelf, but didn’t come down. Adam locked the door behind them.

“Just so you know, I can’t stay long,” Adam said. He glanced around the home that had been his, too, over the summer, at the fluorescent rectangle of doorway that led into the kitchen, the blankets and pillows piled on the couch, the soft orange lights and the absolute darks that the fireplace created. “Probably just tomorrow.”

“That’s okay.” Ronan removed the keys from Adam’s hand and placed them on the coffee table, and then pushed his own fingers into the space the keys had vacated. He drew Adam’s hand up to his mouth and kissed the top of it, flipped it over and kissed the palm.

Adam sighed, and let his eyes drop closed for just a moment. And then he opened them, and kicked off his shoes—a sure sign that he was tired, normally Adam would have untied them first—and hooked two fingers of his free hand under the strap of Ronan’s shirt. “Take this off, please,” he said.

Ronan did.

Adam pressed up against him, folded his arms between their bodies. “You’re warm,” he said, as explanation, and then, “these, too.” _These_ referred to Ronan’s jeans—Adam did most of the work of removing them, and then removed his own, and then nudged and herded and directed until they were wedged together on the couch.

“Okay,” Adam said, and then sighed again, a lush, contented sound. “I was cold. My car did not resurrect with a functioning heater.”

“The Shitbox is alive, then?” Ronan could not think of anything better than this moment. In the entire scope of his dreaming, in the endless impossibility he lived in, there was nothing that could improve upon Adam, here.

“Barely. It might just be the battery. But I’m afraid the alternator is going. Among other things.”

“That fucker. I’ll dream you a new one.”

“A new alternator?”

“A new car.”

Adam’s mouth stretched into an easy grin. His eyes slid shut again. “Maybe. Not right now. We’d have to figure out how to get it out of your living room in the morning.” He said _morning_ like _ma-wur-ning_ , like a three-syllabled word, and Ronan loved him so much that it was physically painful.

Ronan slid his hands up Adam’s back, under his shirt, against the smooth skin that lived there. “I’m thinking of planting a garden,” Ronan said conversationally.

“For next year?”

“Yeah. Like, vegetables and shit. Zucchini. You know. Fucking—radishes, and whatever.”

“Do you even eat radishes?” Adam’s mouth flickered a smile; sleep was circling him. He traced his fingers across the small of Ronan’s back, tucked them against him, daringly low.

“No. But you know what I mean. Carrots. Spinach. Etcetera.”

“ _Copia ciborum, subtilitas impeditur_ ,” Adam said. “Are you going to keep listing vegetables all night?”

“Fuck Seneca,” Ronan replied savagely. Adam laughed—Latin was a game he never tired of—and pushed forward enough for them to kiss again.

Several minutes later, with his hand creating a slow, curious map beneath the front of Adam’s boxers, Ronan said, “I’m also thinking of not planting a garden.”

“Okay,” Adam said, breathless. “So don’t plant a garden.”

“I’m thinking,” Ronan said, “of maybe—living somewhere else.”

He slowed, to make sure that Adam was understanding him.

“Okay,” Adam said, his expression gone from relaxed to dubious in a second. “Like where?”

“Like. Closer to you.” Ronan was suddenly nervous. He hadn’t known he was going to say this particular thing until he was saying it. “If that’s something you would want, I mean.”

“ _Oh_.” The word was close and far away, wondering, uncertain, pleased. He gripped Ronan’s hips and hauled him somehow closer, buried his face against Ronan’s neck, beneath his ear. “Well. Yes. Obviously I want that. I missed you. I miss you all the time,” Adam admitted. His voice was verging on a whisper, slow and sweet like cold honey. “I wouldn’t want you to give anything up.”

“I’m giving something up every time you leave,” Ronan said, because it was the truth. He wanted to shut his eyes. He didn’t. He waited for Adam to press his mouth against the top of Ronan’s tattoo where it hooked over his shoulder, to push one of his legs in between Ronan’s, to finally look at him, eyes half-lidded and fuzzy.

Every part of Ronan burned. This, he thought, was holy love and holy fire. There was no difference; he was lit from the inside.

He and Adam fell back into one another, quiet and grasping and close. The whole room was the fireplace and they were ash and coals, embers and popping sparks. Dreaming was nothing compared to being awake.

(For the first time Ronan could remember, the house was empty of everything but him, and Adam.)

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the song [I'm a Fake by The Used.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duRMeABx4Vg) "love is not like anything/especially a fucking knife"
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at [sentimentalspiders](sentimentalspiders.tumblr.com/). Feel free to say hi!


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